The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council includes all 28 full NATO members and the 22 affiliates of its Partnership for Peace program:
Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Georgia, Finland, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue partners are Libya's neighbors Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia and Israel, Jordan, Mauritania and Morocco.
The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative's members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates - the last two providing warplanes for NATO's Operation Unified Protector - with Oman and Saudi Arabia next in line to join.
After NATO led a conference in London on March 29 to plan for a "post-Gaddafi" Libya along the lines of such precedents as Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan and Iraq, the bloc's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen celebrated the creation of a Contact Group on Libya and stated "NATO has long-standing relations with partner countries from the region, notably through its Mediterranean Dialogue programme and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative."
Two days later Rasmussen delivered an address in Stockholm titled "The New NATO and Sweden's security" in which he stated:
"NATO welcomes contributions from all its partners across the world to ensure that the will of the international community is heard....We have extensive experience of involving partner nations in our operations -- partners such as Sweden, but also partners in the Mediterranean and Gulf regions."
"Afghanistan is another example where we can see the value of partnership. 48 countries are now part of the International Stabilisation Force [International Security Assistance Force] ISAF. With one in four UN member states taking part, this is the largest coalition in history. And Sweden is part of it, along with NATO Allies."
400 Swedish troops serving under NATO in Afghanistan are fighting their country's first war in 200 years.
On April 2, two days after the NATO chief left the country, Sweden deployed the first three warplanes assigned for NATO's air operations in Libya with five more leaving the next day.
As with Afghanistan, the war against Libya is being employed by the U.S. and NATO to consolidate military partnerships with nations around the world under wartime conditions.
Russian political analyst Pyotr Iskenderov recently wrote that "A deployment of multinational forces on a long-term basis under the aegis of NATO paves the way for Brussels to bypass the only restriction [against military occupation] imposed by the UN Security Council on an operation in Libya."
His compatriot Alexander Karasev added:
"An allegedly humanitarian intervention by NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999 ended with the deployment of NATO forces in Kosovo and the setting up of the largest U.S. [overseas base since the Vietnam war] Camp Bondsteel in the province. The U.S. and NATO may repeat this scenario in Libya."
As U.S. military vessels are scheduled to depart the Mediterranean Sea, NATO is amassing an imposing array of warplanes and warships to intensify the attack against Libya.
Tallies compiled by Agence France-Presse and Deutsche Presse-Agentur list the following inventory of military assets deployed against Libya:
Britain: 17 Tornado and Typhoon fighter bombers as well as surveillance, reconnaissance and refuelling aircraft and two frigates and a submarine.
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